Google Puts and Soap Slivers

This site is worth visiting just for its amusing FAQs. Marshall Field’s it is not. For one thing, they sell just one product a day, starting just past midnight, Central time. I signed on seconds later and bought three speaker systems of some kind. I’m not quite sure what it is I bought, really, but they were so cheap, at $12.99, and they bore the Dell logo – I could not resist. Thanks to Steve Sapka for pointing me to this site. I can see the far reaches of the top shelf of my closet filling fast with all this irresistible stuff.

DAN RATHER

We need to be able to trust what we see and hear on 60 Minutes. Serious mistakes were made. But does it matter at all that the secretary who says she didn’t type the memo in question nonetheless confirms the essence of its content? Does it matter at all that the 60 Minutes story was essentially true? Should that not at least be mentioned from time to time, if only as an ironic twist? Just asking. (Here’s another view of the report.)

ECONOMIC OVERVIEW

From the Los Angeles Times. In part:

Over the next 75 years, the best estimate is that Bush’s tax cuts will cost from $10 trillion to $12 trillion. The prescription drug bill will cost about $8 trillion. All this comes while bills mount for the global war against terrorism. In essence, we’ve voted ourselves more services and lower taxes and billed both to our children through a higher national debt that is soaring again after shrinking in the late 1990s.

The combined cost of the tax cut and prescription drug benefit is about five times larger than the projected gap between Social Security’s revenue and its promised benefits over the next 75 years. Yet Washington has decided that the Social Security shortfall is the real crisis. So the administration is discussing changes thatwouldsharply reduce guaranteed Social Security benefits for young workers while protecting benefits for those at or near retirement today.

Bush would allow young workers to offset some of the benefit reductions loss by diverting part of their payroll taxes into private accounts they could invest in stocks and bonds. But there’s a hard pit even in that cherry: The accounts would be funded with trillions of dollars in additional debt.

All we need do to get things at least largely back in whack is to repeal the tax cuts . . . but only on that portion of your income that exceeds, say, $100,000. A break point like that would exempt the bare essentials of middle-class life. On income above that, you’d be back to Clintonian tax rates. At the same time, we could make the fairly modest tweaks to Social Security suggested here last month. In those two swoops, America’s fiscal house would be largely back in order (though health care would still be an issue), and the intergenerational thievery shut down.

And now . . .

No, I’m sorry. We’ve run out of time.

Tomorrow: Google Puts and Soap Slivers.

But seriously: Hotel Rwanda is going to win Best Picture, so you may as well see it now.